Reviewed by: Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807 by Michael Dickinson Sophie Hess (bio) Keywords Slavery, Social death, Middle Passage, Atlantic world Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807. By Michael Dickinson. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2022. Pp. 216. Cloth, $114.95; paper, $24.95.) The published narratives of former bondspeople are some of the most comprehensive and detailed accounts of slavery in existence. These sources can also provoke thorny debates among scholars. Often written and published in collaboration with antislavery movements, these texts have sometimes been questioned for the ways that they might distort experiences of enslavement. In Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807, Michael Dickinson skillfully confronts these critiques, arguing for historians to regard enslavement narratives as "worthwhile historical evidence," which have received "disproportionate scrutiny" in comparison with white authors (7). Dickinson's choice to center these narratives is powerful. What results is a deeply researched and person-centered narrative of individual and community survival amid forced migrations and resettlements throughout the Atlantic world. The book's title subverts Orlando Patterson's theory of social death, a tactic of control employed by enslavers through family separations, name changes, and other acts of alienation.1 While Patterson saw enslaved people as permanently damaged by this violence, Dickinson expands on the work of scholars like Stephanie Smallwood and Vincent Brown, who use social death as a point of departure. Although enslavement was doubtlessly an experience of rupture, these scholars have suggested that despite the threat of social death, enslaved people fought to adapt and maintain networks of care in order to survive. While others whose work touches upon rebirth have focused more closely on specific locations or spaces of bondage, Almost Dead characterizes rebirth as a geographic and temporal process that developed as bondspeople were forced to migrate across oceanic routes and between port cities. Dickinson's text centers movement. The book examines the Middle Passage, as well as journeys between Bridgetown, Kingston, and Philadelphia, considering these cities for their centrality to trade networks. Philadelphia, which Dickinson notes has been traditionally thought of by early Americanists as "a hub of black freedom," also must be understood [End Page 332] as a space of pervasive enslavement, "a hub bondage akin to West Indian cities" (4). The book follows the routes taken by enslaved people in published narratives, noting the points where captivity was "superimposed" upon them, as evidenced even through their names: "Olaudah Equiano to Gustavus Vassa—Akeiso to Florence Hall—Broteer Furro to Venture Smith—Boyrereau Brinch to Jeffrey Brace" (58). Brace's experiences flow through every section of the work, providing it with narrative structure. Though rooted in these texts, the book is also full of also sharp research maneuvers, like detailed analysis of newspapers, maps, and legal records, which build more expansive portraits of Dickinson's subjects. Dickinson contends that memory itself provided a defense against attempts to exterminate pre-bondage identity. Speaking about Florence Hall, Dickinson asserts that through her "testimony," or remembrances of the past, she continued to hold on to her selfhood. In this way, Hall "thwarted" the totality of social death (58). By focusing on identity preservation, Almost Dead allows writers like Brace and Hall a measure of breathing room not always provided in history. Dickinson is less directly concerned with deliberate actions taken to struggle for freedom, and instead, more attentive to the ways that people caught in slavery's web made sense of themselves, their experiences, and their communities. Emotion, particularly grief, plays an essential thematic and methodological role in this work. The stirring final chapter, "A Feast of Grief Eased Our Swollen Hearts," examines how shared emotional experiences helped enslaved people to sustain and protect one another. The title comes from Brace's recollections. After witnessing the death of a fellow enslaved person in Bridgetown, the victim's brother and Brace cried together, finding strength in companionship and catharsis. Dickinson argues that "remembrances of what captives lost served as the bedrock for the new relationships people of African descent developed throughout the Black Atlantic" (116). Almost Dead is a deeply...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Oct 7, 2024
E Ramanjaneyulu + 4
Open Access